This study examines the interplay of attraction and differentiation through the diachronic encoding of causative alternations in Chinese. A corpus-based analysis is conducted to profile the use of two Change of State verbs (COS verbs), pò ‘break’ and kāi ‘open’, focusing on their argument structure constructions. The analysis yields two main insights: (i) In Chinese, there are four pairs of causative alternations. The first pair, CA1, involving the alternation between NP1+COS+NP2 and NP2+COS, serves as the source for two diachronic trajectories. (...) In the first trajectory, NP1+COS+NP2 is replaced by NP1+V+COS+NP2, and forms CA2 with NP2+COS. Subsequently, NP2+COS transitions into NP2+V+COS, and constitutes CA3 with NP1+V+COS+NP2. In the second trajectory, NP1+COS+V+NP2 and NP2+COS+V emerge and form CA4. (ii) Evidence of attraction is found in the mutual influence between the causative variants NP1+V+COS+NP2 and NP1+COS+V+NP2, and in the modeling effect of the causative variant NP1+V+COS+NP2 on the inchoative variant NP2+V+COS. Differentiation is supported by the anchoring force of a larger constructional network, including the transitive/intransitive opposition and compound constructions. This study advances the theoretical understanding of the intertwinement of attraction and differentiation by elucidating the diachronic evolution of causative alternations in Chinese. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study conducted on 17th and 18th century German corpora, confirming that both attraction and differentiation are important mechanisms of change, which interact with socio-symbolic properties of constructions. The paper looks at the frequencies and semantics of wo ‘where’ clauses at the beginning of the New High German period, which are compared to the frequencies and semantics of the connector da ‘there, since’ in the same period. The study reveals that the subordinating connectors wo and da (...) overlapped in their functions and were highly polysemous, establishing spatial, temporal, causal, conditional, and contrast links between clauses. This suggests that the connectors had become functionally similar by means of mutual attraction; however, they differed in that they belonged to different registers. Over the course of the 18th century, the polysemy of wo and da clauses reduced. Being gradually confined to one single meaning, the connectors became less similar. This differentiation occurs because the connectors aligned to distinct high-level schemas in the associative network. The study confirms that analogy is crucial to both attraction and differentiation of functionally overlapping constructions. While attraction involves analogy of specific instances of constructions, differentiation occurs in analogy to high-level abstract constructions in the associative network. (shrink)